This application claims benefit of priority under 35 USC xc2xa7 119 to Japanese Patent Application No. P2000-301522, filed on, Sep. 29, 2000, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing machine having print heads and a control method of the printing machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the case of making a large amount of printed sheets, a cluster printer using a plurality of printers has been proposed. More specifically, the cluster printer allocates the many-sheet print data to the plurality of printers connected via a network from one personal computer, and concurrently operates these plural printers, and thereby, shortens a time to make printed sheets.
A printer which realize high-speed printing by allocating a print data to a plurality of printing sections arranged in parallel, and concurrently operating these printing sections, has been disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-348385 and the like, for example. In the high-speed printer, the plurality of printing sections are concurrently operated, and thereby, it is possible to perform printing at a higher speed as compared with a printing machine, which uses only one printer having the same performance as above.
The above-mentioned printer has the following problems. In other words, in the case of calculating a printing time for each page, and allocating a print data for each page to each printer so that a printing efficiency can be improved (the total printing time can be shortened), each printer has a paper delivery section; for this reason, the printed sheets must be collected in the paper delivery section. Further, a page sequence of the printed sheets is dispersed. For this reason, the printed sheets must be manually collated. In order to prevent the page sequence from being dispersed, the print data has not allocate; however, in this case, when a page having a large amount of data is collected to one printer, a print speed becomes slow.
In an integral-type printing machine including a plurality of printing sections, timing control for print start and print completion is required when feeding and discharging a print paper to each printer.
In the integral-type printing machine including a plurality of printing sections, in the case where there is difference in a paper feed and eject timing when printing to the print paper is completed in each printer, times takes to control paper delivery.
As a method for allocating a print data for each page to each printing section, an optimal method is variable depending upon the number of pages of print original, the number of copies, and a print time spent for each page; for this reason, it is difficult to select an optimal allocating method by a user.
The present invention has been made in view of the above problem in the related art.
An object of the present invention is to provide a printing machine, which includes a plurality of printing sections and a paper delivery section collected to one, and can perform high-speed printing without doing collate work by a user, and a control method thereof.
In order to achieve the above object, the aspect of the present invention inheres in a printing machine including a plurality of printing sections installed in a frame, each printing section having at least a print head, printing patterns on a print paper and a mechanism configured to feed the print paper. Especially, the printing machine encompasses a print data input means configured to input many-sheet print data of the patterns scheduled to be printed on the print paper; a print data allocating means configured to allocate the many-sheet print data to each printing section at a unit of page; a fed paper delivery means configured to feed the print paper to each of the plurality of printing sections; and an ejected paper delivery means configured to feed the print paper ejected from each of the plurality of printing sections. In addition, a pattern contains a character here.
Other and further objects and features of the present invention will become obvious upon an understanding of the illustrative embodiments about to be described in connection with the accompanying drawings or will be indicated in the appended claims, and various advantages not referred to herein will occur to one skilled in the art upon employing of the present invention in practice.